Shopping Season Bah!

Black Friday, Cyber Monday are becoming known terms even in Europe. They are referring to the kick-off of the American shopping season, which traditionally starts the day after Thanksgiving (4th Thursday in November). On Black Friday, stores hope to stop bleeding red ink and to start turning a profit for the year. Cyber Monday is the Monday after when people return to work and find refuge for their shopping addiction on the intenet It is typically a big day for Ebay and Amazon. On Black Friday, you can find great deals. From early morning until 11am, stores will offer big discounts. Early morning becomes earlier and earlier: some stores opened at 4am. Four A - M!

Other than shoes and a few long sleeve shirts for the kids, we avoided the shopping malls. As a matter of fact, as my wife braved the mall on Sunday, I went to a local small coffee shop and worked on my presentation of the past week. 

Throughout the last few years, I condensed my shopping to some clothes while in Argentina, taking advantage of the favorable dollar-peso exchange rate. Even now, my shopping list remains small:

1. Something for my wife and kids
2. Undershirts
3. Pure black t-shirts without a logo or design. 
4. Mock turtle neck (perhaps)

My long term shopping list includes: 

1. Replacement for my 2MP vintage digital camera
2. Replacement for my aging 5 year old Titanium Powerbook

So you will not see me in the malls. I will be counting down a little bit to MacWorld 2008.

In the dark

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Extra caution is required when boarding an aircraft at Santa Barbara Airport. At San Jose airport, a makeshift tunnel guides you from the gate on the tarmac to the occasional propeller plane. You can not mistakenly hop on the wrong airplane. At Santa Barbara airport, all planes are boarded from the tarmac. At 5am in the dark, it is a little tricky to find your plane. Especially if the plane of United Airlines happens to be operated by SkyWest Airlines, and bears no United Airlines logos. They should add a light box in the front similar to bus signs. It doesn't hurt to double check the destination when entering the plane. Helllooo Denver!

Goleta - Santa Barbara Airport

This week I flew in the smallest commercial plane so far: the Embraer 120 is a turbo propeller plane and seats about 25-30 people. It was operated by United Airlines. It is noisy but very stable, unlike the smallest Cesna I flew while in Argentina.


I flew from San Jose to Santa Barbara. The airport of Santa Barbara at Goleta is the cutest airport I've seen. It is a colonial style building. Looking from the outside, you would never know this is airport. You actually get the feeling you landed somewhere in Mexico.

Headline 2014: USA in the World Cup final

It is a bold prediction: USA, the country of baseball, NBA basketball and NFL fatsos, will play semi-final or final of 2014 world cup, if not earlier. Major League Soccer (MLS) is the poor brother of many of bigger sports leagues in the US. Television ratings are so and so. Stadium attendance is up but not like the other sports. And the sports is still mentioned in the same sentence as yawn. The fact that David Beckham and Cuauhtemoc Blanco joined respectively the L.A. Galaxy and Chicago Fire brought some excitement to the game. Even the arrival of old Ruud (Gullit) as the coach for the LA Galaxy brings in hope for the league.

Team USA has been a strong performer in recent world cups. In Germany 2006, except for the first game against the Czech Republic, the US showed great attacking soccer (although the score did not reflect this). During Korea/Japan 2002, the US made it to the round of 16th and lost against Mexico.

However, neither the star power of the MLS, nor the games during previous world cups, show what goes on at the many community parks in the evenings. Impromptu goals are being set up, coaches are fighting for a patch of green to train the many many youth soccer teams. It reminds me a bit of the green parks or along the freeways to Buenos Aires. Everywhere do you see the next Messi or Maradona score his goal. It is a little bit like that in the Bay Area. My son plays soccer for the South Bay soccer league. The excitement at the games is in true American fashion. They are not kidding around. The kids are getting excellent soccer skills. And the believe they can take anyone on in soccer. Soon you will see a US soccer team which will rival the traditional soccer world powers.


Technorati: Soccer USSoccer FIFA

South-Africa 2010

Belgium did not qualify for Uefa Euro 2008. Since I do not have cable television, it is not easy to follow the European Championship qualifying games in the US. I missed a couple of the earlier games of Belgium. And before I realized the qualifiers were going on, the headlines in the Belgian newspapers predicted dooms days. Oh, what an optimism! But they were right: we did not qualify. Belgium (18pts) ended up fifth in Group A, behind Poland (28pts), Portugal (27pts), Serbia (24pts), Finland (24pts), and ahead of Kazakhstan (10pts), Armenia (9pts) and Azerbaijan (5pts).

Today was the drawing for the qualifying groups for South Africa 2010. Belgium was unlucky and ended up in a strong group 5, with Spain, Turkey, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Estonia. Chances will be slim, however traditionally Belgium plays better against stronger teams. Anybody remember the game against Brazil in Japan? If we don't qualify, there will always be Messi and Riquelme.

xkcd

I spent this week between a lab somewhere in North San Diego (at a location I can not disclose) and a hotel room on Shelter Island in the bay of San Diego. The hotel Kona Kai supposed to be 3.5 stars. I snagged it for a decent rate a Hotwire. I rate it 2.5 stars. The hotel is in front of the Navy base at Coronado.

Our software testing was progressing nice. Our co-conspirators had posted two improvised swords and this cartoon of xkcd against a cubicle wall.


It was my introduction to a fabulous geek cartoon of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Check out the background story at Wikipedia. As our test scenarios were progressing, I browsed older xkcd posts. Here are a couple of my favorites:




(You can get the last one even on a cool geeky t-shirt)

The case of the lazy server

Despite the non-standard and closed protocol, the slow performance, lack of Firefox support, lack of basic server side calendar features (e.g. alarm email, SMS, iCal/webdav calendar feed), I've tried to make the Microsoft Exchange server work for me. ... mmh ... trying to play nice ... However, I keep on failing. It is a case of a lazy server:

I entered "meeting minutes" in the search box. The answer:

Your search returned more results than can be displayed. Refine your search and try again to reduce the number of results. 651 results for "meeting minutes" in all folders and items

Can't handle 651 results? Ok, then. I expected too much. Did it show the first few hundred? Oh-nooo. That would be too much work. How would I know how to refine my search. Perhaps "meeting minutes - project replace Exchange" will do the trick. Helloooo Google, shall we dance?